Downloaded from https://www.everyspec.com FM 34-54 MACEDONIAN: Macedonian is spoken by perhaps two million people in southeastern Yugoslavia. The Macedonian alphabet is similar to the Serbian, except that letters 6 and 28 are not used and three other letters are added. The added letters are letter 4 with an acute >, letter 17 with an acute >, and . Macedonian language documents are rare. The Arabic alphabet has generally followed the spread of Islam and has been used to write numerous languages, some of which (notably Turkish) no longer use it.
This alphabet, appropriately modified, currently is used for all the dialects of Arabic and for Persian, Urdu, and other Indo-Iranian languages, such as Dari, Pashto, and Kurdish. The Russian and Cyrillic alphabets seem even more related to one another when compared to Arabic. ARABIC AND PERSIAN: The best distinction a nonlinguist can make is to separate Persian documents from Arabic documents. Persian linguists cannot read Arabic, and vice versa, unless they know both languages. ARABIC : Arabic is spoken over a large area extending from Morocco on the west to borders of ancient Persia (modern Iran) on the east.
The spoken language varies widely in this area, but the written language is fairly standard. Only a specialist could hope to distinguish the varieties of Arabic, but a sharp-eyed nonlinguist can learn to recognize Arabic and distinguish it from Persian. The best indication is perhaps the presence of letter 32, which is not used in Persian. The next best indication is perhaps the frequent occurrence of the definite article , which is spelled with letter 1 (initial) and letter 27 (initial). A final characteristic is the absence of the special Persian letters: letters 3, 7, 14 , and 26. Since this is a negative indication, however, it cannot be used by itself to prove that a text is Arabic.
PERSIAN: Persian is used in Iran. It is indicated by the presence of the special Persian letters 3, 7, 14, and 26, and by the absence of letter 32. Other indications are a paucity of letter 1 and 27 combinations (the Arabic definite article) and a slightly different preference in numeral usage. G-14 ARABIC ALPHABET LANGUAGES